The amount of uncompressed digital video data stored at film studios and postproduction facilities is currently increasing rapidly. This causes tremendous financial burdens because new investment for storage and network equipment must be made, which also results in a significant increase in electricity bills.
The currently preferred technology to cope with the expansion of digital video data is mathematically lossless compression. In mathematically lossless compression, digital video files are compressed for transmission and storage, while the contents are the same as the original files when they are decompressed. Thus, both storage space and transmission time are saved.
However, mathematically lossless compression technology has been difficult to incorporate within computing systems, since application programs from disparate vendors are required to be modified.
Traditional compression typically comprises blind content compression systems. Existing blind content compression systems, such as zip, tar, etc., typically perform generic compression to files, without consideration as to the precise file structure of the files themselves. However, file formats often have widely varying construction, such that generic blind compression provides a wide spectrum of performance. The generic nature of such blind compression often doesn't work, particularly for video compression.
OS supported codecs such as Directshow™ filters are typically implemented for specific compression of consumer video files, and can inherently result in performance bottlenecks and/or quality limitations. For example, Directshow™, a multimedia architecture available through Microsoft, Inc., of Redmond, Wash., such as provided for a variety of Windows™ operating systems, typically divides multimedia system processing tasks through a set of filters.
Application specific application programming interfaces (APIs), e.g. such as Adobe Premiere™ SDK, typically depend upon third party APIs for performance, and require integration and support that is specific to applications for which they are implemented.
While some compression programs are ideally suited for a specified file format, e.g. *.tgz, *.bmp, etc., a user is required to knowledgably know what file type each file is, and then is required to apply the desired compression program, to create a compressed file to be stored.
It would be advantageous to provide a system that performs file-type-based compression, without ongoing user intervention. As well, it would be beneficial to provide a compression system that is easily scaled to provide file-type-based compression for one or more users, with minimal hardware requirements.
For example, the motion picture industry commonly produces vast amounts of video data files for each of numerous film projects at any given time. Raw film and digital footage are often collected, stored and edited. The required storage for such memory intensive operations is staggering, and the industry continually has to invest in hardware and software dedicated to these tasks.
It would therefore be beneficial to provide a compression system that can be readily implemented to be integrated with existing equipment, for a wide variety of computer systems, across a wide variety of system environments, e.g. networks, to save both money and time for such entities.
As well, it would be extremely beneficial to provide networked compression and storage, which can offload hardware and software requirements for dedicated terminals.
It would also be advantageous to provide a data compression system and an associated process that provide transparent file-type-based compression for one or more users. The development of such a data compression system would constitute a major technological advance.